Statistics In Simple Terms

When we come across the word statistics we are bit confused and afraid of getting to know more about statistics. In this blog, I will clear the concepts about statistics and how statistics is divided. Mainly, statistics is divided into two types. First is Descriptive Statistics and second is Inferential Statistics.

Descriptive Statistics gives the overall description of the data. From descriptive statistics we come upto conclusion about the whole data. We study the whole dataset/ data points and come up with a conclusion about whole data. For example, if we have to study what is average age of certain city, then we will take each and every person's age. Once we have the age, we will come up with some strong conclusion about the average age of that City. In similar way, I can get the median and most common age in that City. This process is called Descriptive Statistics.

Inferential Statistics studies only the small part of data and uses the information from small data to make inference about whole data set. For example, we collect ages of whole population from city. Then, we select small part of the population to study and come up with insights about whole population of city.This process is called Inferential Statistics. The word population is described in the next paragraph.

When we select the small part, it is called Sample and the whole dataset is called Population. In above example, sample is the small set of people, that we have selected. Population is the whole population of city. The variables that defines the population or gives more information about the population is called Parameter. Parameter is always denoted by greek letters like mu (population mean), sigma (population standard deviation).

Now, let's understand the meaning of Statistics. The variables that we use to define the sample is called Statistic. Statistic will be mean, median, mode, quartile etc. The study that finds the statistic and coming to a conclusion about the population is called Statistics. Statistics is defined by english letters like x bar for sample mean, s for sample standard deviation.

The meaning of standard deviation will be given in another blog of mine. Hope now the basic concept is cleared about statistics. Till then keep learning and let me know if you like this post. The above content is written by me and from the courses, that I have completed from online learning platforms.

Thank You,

Soham Sanjay Shinde